Characterization is not divorced from plot, not a coat of paint you slap on after the structure of events is already built. Rather characterization is inseparable from plot.

Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.

Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up.

What characters do must grow out of who they are, and who they are is, in turn, influenced by what you make happen to them.

There are two wrong reactions to a rejection slip: deciding it's a final judgment on your story and/or talent, and deciding it's no judgment on your story and/or talent.

In commercial fiction especially, everything in the story usually contributes directly to the plot The shorter the story, the truer this is

You think intelligence and grit can succeed by themselves, but I'm telling you that's a pretty illusion.

You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.

Technology is Darwinian. It spreads. It evolves. It adapts. The most dangerous wipes out the less fit.

Conflict is the place where character and plot intersect.

Religious reverence for one's own job, even if the job is worth doing, is a sexual turnoff.

Life is easier lived when lived for others.

Great mercy, great love.

Nothing falls into a man's lap from heaven. It is from labour that life grows.

We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.

Everything grows rounder and wider and weirder, and I sit here in the middle of it all and wonder who in the world you will turn out to be.

Children don't need much advice but they really do need to be listened to and not just with half an ear.

I can't focus on any one day, because I always have to be ready for the next. It's fun but frenetic - like living in a circus that never stops performing.

I looked back, but Bast and Sadie seemed fine. They were still staring at the water as if it were some amazing Internet video.

I'm the first one in my family born with all my rights. I'm a ninth generation American.

I never exploited my father’s role in helping Jews avoid the concentration camps...